I love sleep. I also enjoy waking up, as it’s the start of a new day. However, I struggle to wake up.

I set an alarm, it wakes me up. A few weeks later, I find myself sleeping through the alarm noise. Sometimes, I’m not deciding to lie in, I literally don’t wake up until after my alarm (no matter how many I set). If I change the alarm noise, the cycle repeats.

For me, this is a challenge I want to overcome and overcome fast! I’ve put in place a number of strategies to try and wake up, however I also want to add some accountability. By writing this post, I’m committing to myself to wake up on time.

So what am I aiming for? At the moment my alarm is set for 7am each morning, with follow up alarms at 7:15 and 7:30. A number of times these past few weeks I’ve ended up waking up at 8:30am. So, yes, not late and early enough for me to be wherever I might need to be for the day, but it isn’t building a habit.

Extreme Alarm Clock

I get used to alarm noises, quickly! I can easily sleep through them. So how can I overcome it?

Change the senses.

Now, I’m not woken by noise, but by feel. An alarm clock that shakes my bed! This worked like a charm… until… I formed the muscle memory to turn it off and I then found myself turning the alarm off in a half-sleep state, away enough to move, not awake enough to make the decision to fully wake up – disaster.

Now, I’ve move the alarm base and so I’m not able to turn it off whilst half asleep – for now anyway!

A Reason

I want to wake up early so that I can get my day started, get more work done and be more productive. I have things to wake up for, however these aren’t time bound activities and I think that is where I have gone wrong. If I wake up 30 minutes later, I just start working 30 minutes later, I haven’t missed anything, I have slept through an activity, so in reality it didn’t make much difference.

Now I want to add a reason. Whether that be to wake up and go the gym early or go and meet someone early. I now set a time bound reason. If I wake up 30 minutes late, I might have missed the chance to go to the gym. The possibility of missing something will be a strong enough factor to get me awake.

 

So why post about this? Well, now I have made it known what I am trying to do, even if only to myself through the act of typing this. That accountability is the third factor that I hope will get me up in the morning!

P.S. If you have any techniques that get you awake in the morning, let me know 🙂